Sisters in Arms

by Kaia Alderson

  Mary returned with a fresh set of rags. She placed them on the corner of Grace’s desk. Then she handed Grace one that had been dampened with cool water.

  “Thanks.” Grace wiped the last of the residue from her hand. She held up the Dixie Peach jar with her clean hand and grinned. “Looks like I was right on both accounts. Let’s hope the gum and the grease didn’t make the letter completely illegible.”

  Mary laughed. As she returned to her station, she added, “Good luck with that.”

  “I’m going to need it.” Grace returned her attention to the letter. Destroying a good portion of the outer packaging was inevitable. She jotted down all the information she could glean from it before she went for her scissors. The return address simply said “Mom.” No help there. Thankfully, it had been stamped by the sender’s post office back in April of the previous year.

  “An almost year-old letter from Dublin, Georgia, huh? Something is better than nothing.” Grace wrote this information down on her notepad. There wasn’t anything else on the outside that looked useful. She took her scissors and began to carefully cut the packaging and the gum away from the letter. When it was freed, she unfolded the letter.

  My dear baby boy . . .

  This was the part that Grace hated most about her job—reading someone else’s letter. In most cases, the letters contained run-of-the-mill greetings, best wishes, and innocent gossip about family and friends. That did little to lessen the feeling each time that Grace was intruding on a stranger’s privacy. However, a letter’s contents provided the clues that ultimately led her to the rightful owner.

  Some men came by the house today with some sad news. Germans shot down Anthony’s airplane over in Africa last week. I’m sorry to say your brother is gone, son. I need you to take good care of yourself over there. You’re the only one I have left . . .

  Grace gasped as her eyes darted back to the name “Anthony.” The letter fluttered to the floor. Her hands shook as an invisible vise took hold of her lungs, stealing her air. Her body may have been there in that cramped office in a drafty school in the middle of England. But her mind snatched her back to that sticky summer evening when a knock at her family’s door had changed everything. A knock that she wished had never been answered.

  Mary rushed over to her side. “Grace, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I . . .”

  This was not the first time she had read a letter informing a soldier of a loved one’s death. She handled letters like these at least once a week. But this was the first one where . . .

  “This letter says that his brother has been killed. His name was Anthony. Tony . . .”

  The letter had been written lovingly by hand. But all Grace could see was the typewritten telegram that her own family had received. How reading the words “regret to inform you” snatched all the warmth from her body. How she had sobbed when the uniformed visitors had given them the news. Grace put her fist in her mouth. She bit her knuckle to keep herself from sobbing aloud. Her whole body vibrated from the restraint.

  “Maybe you should go lie down.” Mary placed her hand on Grace’s back. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “No.” Grace shook Mary away. “I have to find this Robert. He needs to hear this from his mama and not from some strangers or a damn telegram.”

  She picked up the pages of the letter from the floor. It took several tries to collect them all since her fingers were still unsteady.

  Mary took a reluctant step back. “Are you sure? I can get the chaplain. You look like you should get looked at by a medic at the very least.”

  “I’m fine. It’s just a shock. It’s . . .” Grace paused, grasping to find the right words.

  “Too close to home,” Mary finished for her. “Too much like your brother, right?”

  Grace stared at Mary, not expecting the younger woman to have known about Tony.

  “His name was Anthony too. You talked about him that night when the Germans attacked our ship. I overheard you when Captain Jones lost her cool.”

  “That’s right. I did. That was an intense night. I’m surprised you remembered anything.”

  “Your composure is what got me through that night. And every day that we’ve worked together since we’ve been here. You always keep it together when everything else is falling apart. I was terrified that I was going to die on that boat. It was my lowest moment since joining the WAC.”

  The vise grip on Grace’s chest loosened. She had perceived her lack of emotion during stressful moments as proof that she was a heartless bitch. It was a shock to hear that the young woman before her instead found it admirable. “I’m glad to hear that I was helpful.”

  The response sounded empty to her own ears. Ironically devoid of emotion. She smiled at Mary, hoping that her mouth could convey the warmth that her words could not.

  Mary returned the smile. “You made me want to be brave. I’m just humbled that I’m able to be here now to return the favor.”

  Now there was a lump in Grace’s throat. “Thank you.”

  Grace looked up at the clock. Only a few minutes left in their shift. She nodded her head in the clock’s direction. “It’s almost quitting time. How about you run on ahead a little early. I’ll cover for you.”

  Mary chewed half of her bottom lip. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure a few minutes to yourself in the barracks ahead of everyone would be a treat. And I . . . I’ll be fine.”

  A smile broke out across Mary’s face. “Well, when you put it that way. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Captain!”

  It was only when the door closed behind Mary that Grace put her head down on her forearms and cried.

  Once she had cried herself out, Grace wiped away her tears and got back to work. So far she knew that this Robert G. and his brother, Anthony, were from somewhere in Georgia. Grace jotted this information down on her notepad. She began to scan the letter for more clues.

  Once word got out about Anthony, the neighbors started coming by with food. So much food. I’m afraid most of it will wind up in the trash. But Randy Johnson’s mother from down the street did drop off one of those 7UP pound cakes you boys like so much. She visited for about an hour. She said she thinks he’s somewhere in Belgium. Maybe you two will bump into each other. How swell would that be? I hate to think of you over there with a bunch of strangers when you receive this letter . . .

  Grace wrote down a few more notes. A few of her Bob Job girls had made a list of all the Roberts in their files. They kept it next to the cubbies where they filed their index cards for each soldier stationed in Europe. Grace got up and grabbed it along with a fresh notepad. She made a list of everyone on it who had a last name starting with G and a home address in Dublin, Georgia—a total of about twenty names in all.

  Then she went over to the next room where they kept all the soldier cards for last names beginning with J. There she was able to find the card for a Randy Johnson whose hometown was Dublin, Georgia. With his home address in hand, Grace was able to find her Robert G.—also known as Robert Gordon of the Fourth Infantry Division—who thankfully lived on the same street.

  “Yes!” Grace pumped her fist in the air.

  “What are you still doing here, Captain?” Sergeant Dolores Browne popped her head into the workroom. Dolores worked the evening shift but liked to get herself settled in early.

  “Oh, sorry. I thought I was alone. I just made another impossible match.”

  “Woohoo!” Dolores joined Grace in pumping her fist in the air. The Bob Job crew had created a tradition of celebrating every time one of them matched a letter with incomplete addressee information to a soldier’s card.

  “Thanks.” Grace grinned. “I’ll just finish repackaging this and I’ll be out of your way.”

  Dolores reached out her hand to take what was left of Robert Gordon’s package from her. “You’ve been here long enough. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  A few min
utes later, an emotionally exhausted Grace fell face-first onto her bunk in the officers’ quarters located across the street from the main building of the King Edward School.

  “I am so tired,” she moaned into the pillow. Each word was punctuated by a pause for emphasis. “I’d give anything for a warm shower and some leave so I wouldn’t have to move for forty-eight hours.”

  Eliza leaned over the side of her bunk, located above Grace’s. “I can’t grant you a weekend pass, but I can score you an invitation for a home-cooked meal.”

  Grace rolled over and propped herself up onto her elbows. “Tell me more.”

  Eliza grinned at her, then jumped down from her bunk. Without blinking an eye, Eliza then plopped herself down onto Grace’s bunk. This was one of Grace’s pet peeves. Eliza had a bad habit of taking up space—one she was totally oblivious to—and Grace had a thing about other people’s behinds on her bed. However, Eliza’s mention of a home-cooked meal overrode Grace’s annoyance. She bit her tongue.

  “As you know, my duties as Special Services officer require me to go off-site around town to procure various supplies, equipment, and services. A side perk of that is it puts me in contact with the local population. And a lot of the local population have been curious about us, so naturally they like to come up and talk to me . . .”

  Grace rolled her eyes. Eliza always took forever to get to the point. It got on her nerves. “Girl, stay focused. Skip to the ‘home-cooked meal’ part.”

  “I am getting to it. Hold on to your knickers.”

  “My what?”

  “Knickers. It’s what they call underwear over here. Anyway, most of the locals just want to say hello and extend thanks for us Yanks coming to the British people’s aid. So I was on my way back from a public relations visit with the lord mayor’s staff. I bumped into this older lady—a Mrs. Louise Brown—while she was picking up her ration coupons at city hall. As it turns out, her only son is ‘somewhere in France’—well, that’s what she thinks, she doesn’t know for sure. She tells me that she wants to extend a kindness to the Americans that she hopes some French family might be bestowing on her son. She said that I look like a nice girl and why don’t I bring a friend along over to her flat.”

  “So you want me to tag along with you to a total stranger’s house in a city we don’t know in a foreign country.”

  “Yeah.”

  Grace frowned. Her gut told her this was not a good idea. However, she had been working on not being such a stick-in-the-mud since they’d come to town. And after her meltdown over that Bob Job letter this afternoon, she had an urge to do something a little out of character.

  Grace bit her lip. “Did the old lady look like she could cook?”

  Eliza’s mouth spread into her trademark smile. “She sure did.”

  “Fine. Count me in.” Grace kicked her feet into Eliza’s side. “Now get your butt off my bed.”

  This was how Grace and Eliza wound up in the company of one Mrs. Louise Brown and her spinster flatmate, Miss Agnes Moore, for Sunday evening dinner. Grace and Eliza had even gifted the widow and spinster with a bar of chocolate that had survived their Atlantic crossing, much to their hosts’ delight. It was not lost on the visitors that hosting them for a meal had taken up a portion of their meat rations for the week. They hoped the rare treat for civilians this side of the Atlantic would help to make up for their sacrifice in the name of hospitality.

  Before Grace and Eliza knew it, the midnight hour was creeping upon them. More than once, they had glanced discreetly at their watches and exchanged knowing glances as Mrs. Louise and Miss Agnes—as they insisted on being called—continued to chatter on about what their homeland had been like before the war. The Americans had attempted to excuse themselves politely, noting the late hour. But that didn’t deter Mrs. Louise from pulling out a cardboard box of pictures depicting her son as a youth.

  “He was such a cheeky chap back then.” Mrs. Louise chuckled nostalgically at a picture of her son, Edwin, as an infant in his “nappies.” She looked over to Miss Agnes affectionately and squeezed the woman’s hand. “We were so fortunate that Agnes here came into our lives in those years after my Edmund was killed in the Great War. He died at the Battle of the Somme, you know. I should have a picture of him in here . . .”

  Mrs. Louise stretched her fingers toward the back of the box.

  “Is it normal for dinner to go this late?” Grace whispered to Eliza. They had been there since five o’clock in the afternoon. It was now going on half past eleven.

  “How should I know?” Eliza whispered back, shrugging. “Maybe late-night meals are just how they do things over here.”

  Eliza settled back into her hard, threadbare chair. She stifled a yawn behind her palm. She didn’t want to alarm Grace, who had given her a suspicious look when she told her what time dinner was supposed to start. Back home, social calls such as this one would have been set for a little earlier in the afternoon. It was a necessary precaution owing to the air raids the city had suffered under the last few years.

  Mrs. Louise looked up from the box of photographs on her lap. “Oh no, I’m boring you with these pictures, aren’t I?”

  Eliza quickly pasted a smile on her face. “It’s just getting a little late is all.”

  Mrs. Louise glanced at the ancient clock on the corner table. “Oh dear, it is late.” She and Miss Agnes shared a look. It was obvious that Mrs. Louise felt bad. It looked like the woman was finally going to bid them farewell.

  Eliza nearly jumped out of that uncomfortable chair.

  But then their host looked at her flatmate again. Miss Agnes raised an eyebrow. Mrs. Louise’s shoulders dropped in defeat. “I’m almost done with this box of pictures. It won’t be but a few minutes more. You don’t mind, do you?”

  What had that look from Miss Agnes been about? Eliza hadn’t been able to get a bead on her all night. The woman had a nervous air about her, almost domineering actually, that sent Eliza’s reporter instincts abuzz.

  “If you’re sure it’ll only be a few minutes more. We really do have to get back to our post. We’ll be in big trouble if we arrive after curfew. Or, worse, we could get caught in an air raid or something.”

  Eliza hated to play her guilt card on the old woman. It had been almost a year since the last German night raid had fallen upon Birmingham. But the urban landscape still bore the scars of bombed-out buildings in the city center and rows of recently dug graves in the nearby cemeteries. With active hostilities with the Axis still going on across the English Channel on the Continent, the threat of another German attack was a very real and constant concern.

  “We haven’t had an attack since you Colored WACs arrived in the city,” Mrs. Louise assured her.

  “Yes, only that one night of air-raid warnings. But no bombs,” Miss Agnes chimed in with a sickly-sweet smile. “You Yank ladies seem to be the stroke of luck we’ve needed around here.”

  Mrs. Louise chewed her bottom lip. “Oh, Agnes, they’re right. It is getting late. How about I fix you up a bag of leftovers for your lunch tomorrow?”

  Grace gave Eliza a look that screamed she had better keep her mouth shut. Eliza almost blurted out that that wouldn’t be necessary, but she didn’t want to insult her hosts’ hospitality. The meal itself had been nothing fancy: a meat pie—the British women called them pasties—that was more vegetable scraps than meat. The tea was weak but still tasted better than the plain brackish well water that the American women were slowly but surely becoming used to.

  British civilians had been subjected to rationing and making the most of what they had for far longer than the American public had back on the home front. But the conversation and start of new friendships made the time spent together seem like a four-star outing.

  Eliza took a sip from her teacup. She smiled politely as she forced herself to swallow it. She considered herself a coffee girl. She had never much cared for tea before the war. She had grown to loathe it now that she was living in England. But s
he dared not insult her hosts over something so insignificant in the greater scheme of things.

  “Mrs. Louise. Ma’am . . .” Eliza gently placed a hand on Mrs. Louise’s wrist when she returned from packing up the leftovers. “I really do want to see the rest of your pictures. But it is getting quite late and we really need to get back to our quarters.”

  “Oh, but you mustn’t!” Miss Agnes’s protest came out a bit more forceful than she apparently intended, causing them all to jump in their seats. The woman had been quiet for most of the evening, sharing very little of herself. “Oh, I am sorry. We just wanted to see if the rumors are true.”

  Grace and Eliza gave each other quizzical looks. Grace shrugged, then stifled a yawn behind her fist.

  “What rumors?” Eliza asked the older woman gently.

  Now Mrs. Louise had the grace to look sheepish. “I apologize. I know it was rude of us to keep you two out so late. Especially since we’ve had such a lovely evening together. But we just had to know . . . I just had to see it for myself.”

  Grace leaned forward. “See what?”

  “Why your tails, of course. That’s what them American fellas told us about you all before you came.”

  “Tails?” Grace and Eliza asked the question at the same time.

  “They said that back where they come from, all the . . . the . . . the . . .” Mrs. Louise paused. Her cheeks turned pink with embarrassment. She looked to her friend for assistance.

  “I believe the word you are looking for, my dear, is the Negroes.” Miss Agnes paused after whispering the word. Then she cleared her throat to continue. “Those American boys were quite insistent that your people grew tails down to their ankles once the clock struck midnight.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed. Eliza’s mouth opened, but she quickly closed it. What did one say in response to such a preposterous admission? She watched as their hostesses hung their heads in shame. As much as she wanted to chastise these women for believing this story for even a second, what was the point? She was more annoyed with the mean-hearted American soldiers who had fed them these lies.